Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
Communications
Dear Editor,
By the time this is in print, all members of the Society may have received details
of graduate courses in American Music now available at the Institute of United States
Studies in London, where I am Head of the Music Program and a member of the Board.
The Institute's energetic and dedicated Director is Professor Gary McDowell,
the distinguished historian, who has given its work a rapidly increasing profile
over the past few years. This is one of nine institutes of advanced study, and it
was founded in 1965 to promote and coordinate American Studies in the University
of London and develop contacts between teachers of subjects relating to the
United States in other institutions. But there was no music program until 1996,
when I started to teach a music component within the existing MA in United States
Studies, which is actually the oldest degree of its kind in the United Kingdom.
The music course is a selective survey, concentrating on issues in American
Music of all kinds, mostly from the Civil War to minimalism.
When I urged our Board to develop American arts within the MA, I was warmly supported
by the Chair, The Rr. Hon. The Baroness Thatcher LG OM FRS, who readily
agreed with me that the whole world had been singing American tunes for most
of this century and that music was an essential part of American identity. Now
we shall be taking students for M.PHil. and Ph.D. degrees who can register at
any time during the academic year. The emphasis will be on subjects involving
British or European connections, or situations where students have ready
access to sources in the U.S.
My own research for some years has been concerned with extensions of ragtime.
Notably the London novelty composer, pianist, educator and celebrity
Billy Mayerl (1902-1959). My book on him and his context should be out
by late 1998 and I hope to have an opportunity to talk to a Sonneck conference
about this aspect of American music exported to England and -- yes -- even
improved!
Meanwhile I send greetings to all Sonneck members who remember me as well as
those known to me only through books, articles, or recordings. I look forward
to keeping in touch.
--Peter Dickinson
Institute of United States Studies in London
Dear Fellow Sonneckers:
On 6 October 1998, thousands of men in American music will celebrate the centennial
of the founding of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the professional music fraternity. From its
inception at the New England Conservatory of Music, where second honorary member
George W. Chadwick gave the group its name, through its growth encompassing
more than 200 chapters, the fraternity's membership list reads like a who's who
of American men in music. Through its philanthropic arm, the Sinfonia
Foundation, the brotherhood has provided thousands of dollars in grants
supporting research in American music and commissioning the creation of new
works by eminent American composers.
--Philip A. Todd
University of Kentucky School of Music
Dear Editor,
Your consideration of the teaching of American music at the University of New
Hampshire omits one important figure. Robert W. Manton (1894-1967), who founded the
music department of the University of New Hampshire in the 1920s and taught there
until 1964, was a keen supporter of American music and taught a full-length
course in the subject at least as early as 1950. (He believed it to be the first
course purely in American music to be taught in an American University; I am not
sure that he was accurate in this, nor am I sure when he first taught the course).
He extended this interested at least one summer to teaching a class in American music
at the University of New Hampshire Summer Youth Music School. It was in those
classes -- in 1952 or 1953 -- that I first heard the music of Beach and Foote and
developed my interest in the Second New England School.
Though Manton was a conservative composer, modeling his style on MacDowell (his
New Hampshire Idyls of 1926 for piano give a good sample of his music), he
was careful in his teaching to give respect to the modernists. My interest in Roger Sessions
also dates from his Summer Youth Music School classes, as does, I suspect, my
passionate conviction that American music should be taught in American universities.
How he would have loved the Sonneck Society!
--Wayne Shirley
Music Division, Library of Congress
Updated 4/15/98